At August's End

Oh, the beauty of these late summer days, when all the living world takes part in the change. There's a cool mist in the morning air and a hint of autumn at evening. All the world is yellowing. The grass is growing pale and blanched. The world-weary leaves hang limp on long-suffering trees. Their work is done, their short season spent. All they want is to drop back to the earth they came from, and there with time they will return to the soil and be reborn again as leaves.

Transience itself is the maker of such beauty, and I could almost weep for the infernal sadness of it all. Like all the fleeting sons of time, the summer passes in fiery splendor. At last there comes a day of ripening gardens and tart apples growing wild in an abandoned farmyard. But in the ending of one beauty, there comes new beauty, new life.

I can't get enough of SGL #232 these days. It's vast and crisscrossed by old country lanes--some of which can still be traveled by car--and it's a nice mix of woods and fields, and streams, and hills, and steep ravines.

Up to this point I'd been exploring the northern arm of the game lands, along the old Buffalo Camp Road, which is no longer open to public traffic, and along Polecat Hollow Road, which hasn't been traveled by a private vehicle since I was in high school.

But this time around, I ventured into the southern arm of the game lands and followed Buck Run Road southeast and the entire length of the valley of Buck Run.

The side roads are the best hiking options. They strike off to the left and lead up to a broad ridge that mostly served as a hay field in recent memory. Buck Run Road itself follows a scenic stream, and in places it's skirted with some interesting rock formations.

Up in the high meadow above the road, I sat in the grass of an abandoned farmyard (top photo) and meditated on the changefulness of things. It's beautiful, wild country, but even there in its embrace I felt a sense of imminent destruction. The feeling is irrational. It's almost hysterical. But the fragility of the trees, and of the fading grass, and of the very earth around me felt so real. Mother Pennsylvania has always been a slut, and she's prostituting her children to the shale drillers: our state forests, our state parks, our state game lands. The DEP is in the hands of the very people who benefit from the wanton squandering of our resources. The EPA is being dismantled and incapacitated on a massive scale. I can't escape the bleak suspicion that everything is threatened and beauty's time is short. It doesn't take a morose doomsday prophet to see that life cannot go on forever in the way that we're living it, so far removed from the earth that sustains us, so wasteful, and destructive, and self-indulgent.

But transience and the possibility of loss are part of what makes beauty beautiful. And here at August's end, it was good to sit at the edge of a grassy field, high above the valley below, and to dwell in the moment at hand, then to wonder for a time who used to call this lonesome place home...and what tomorrow will hold.